This newspaper agreed with Mayor Francis G. Slay and the local business community when a set of amendments to the City Charter were put before the voters in 2004.
As we all argued at the time, the City of St. Louis has a relatively weak mayoral system that can hamper the City’s efficiency, flexibility and competitive advantage in attracting investment and development. Voters were reminded at the time that the mayor is only one vote out of three on the City’s all-important fiscal body, the Board of Estimate & Apportionment.Of course, charter reform failed and the City retained its weak mayoral system. In City government, the comptroller and president of the Board of Aldermen remain very powerful positions. These two positions each carry just as much weight as the mayor’s in making every major decision about how the City spends its money and allocates its limited resources.
In such a system, the comptroller and president of the Board of Aldermen are as vital to the City as the mayor. If protecting the mayor is of value to taxpayers, then appropriate protections for the comptroller and aldermanic president should be of equal value. A current budget request that the City hire a new set of deputy sheriffs and make two of them available, as needed, to protect the comptroller and aldermanic president is warranted – as warranted as the current security detail that protects the mayor, at more than twice the expense of two deputy sheriff salaries and benefits.
As Aldermanic President Lewis Reed explained Tuesday to the Board of Aldermen’s Ways and Means Committee, the current procedure is for police officers or city marshals to provide security for the board’s meetings. Hiring deputy sheriffs for this duty would be cheaper and safer, since it would not occupy any uniformed policemen, as does the mayor’s security detail, which he gets as a member of the Board of Police Commissioners, at the cost of upwards of $200,000 a year.
In a bit of irony, Slay showed up for this budget hearing – in the same building as his office – ushered by one of his three full-time police officer escorts. Slay had joined Reed and Comptroller Darlene Green in approving the request for the new deputy sheriffs when voting on the Board of Estimate & Apportionment, but he was not questioned by the committee and has not discussed the meeting on his campaign website, where he previously argued that protecting Reed, Green and the aldermen was “prudent” in the light of the recent tragedy in Kirkwood.
Reed and Green have been the subjects of aggressive reporting on this minor budget matter by the Post-Dispatch. They have come to expect this type of news coverage from the Post, which features the mayor and his chief of staff Jeff Rainford on its Community Advisory Board but has never offered the same opportunity to Reed nor Green. Unlike the mayor, as readers of this paper know – and readers of the Post have been reminded twice by the two head shots that have accompanied the two Post stories about the deputy sheriff budget item – are black.
Green and Reed, as much as Slay, meet reasonable criteria for protection by the City they serve, and they should have it.